Framework Labs, a fintech studio for the quickly rising “Decentralized Finance” or “DeFi” business, has closed an $eight million seed spherical of financing led by funding agency Station 13. Framework Labs is a primary of its sort fintech studio for DeFi; a full-stack accomplice to bootstrap the decentralized protocols reinventing finance. Its creators are the founders of Framework Ventures, the DeFi enterprise fund finest often called the biggest holders of decentralized oracle community Chainlink ($2.5 billion market cap) and crypto-backed, artificial asset platform Synthetix ($380 million market cap) apart from core growth groups.
Based in early 2019 Framework Ventures helped present early-stage capital to the then-nascent DeFi business, and the staff noticed a possibility to help the rising class of DeFi primitives with extra than simply enterprise capital with Framework Labs. The seed funding permits Framework Labs to develop its analysis, buying and selling and engineering groups, craft governance proposals for DeFi blockchain protocols, present liquidity to non-custodial decentralized exchanges, incubate promising startups, and construct consumer-facing functions on prime of protocols that Framework Ventures has backed.
Framework Labs has quietly expanded operations during the last 12 months to grow to be arguably the biggest DeFi market participant within the business, serving to spur the full market capitalization of DeFi protocols to over $6 billion. Already, Framework Labs has grow to be:
- The biggest staker on Synthetix, a protocol for buying and selling and creating artificial belongings
- The biggest liquidity supplier and market maker on Uniswap, a well-liked decentralized exchange for Ethereum
- An integral node operator offering the off-chain information that powers DeFi through Chainlink
- The biggest supplier of staking providers for 2 main blockchains
“DeFi is coming into its own and beginning to achieve product-market fit at scale, yet traditional investors are asleep at the wheel when it comes to the category. It isn’t enough to buy and hold tokens and provide ‘thought leadership’ – DeFi is not a spectator sport. Active participation, governance, building of consumer products, and advanced trading strategies are all part of the complex process of making a DeFi protocol successful. We are at the bleeding edge of this financial technology,” mentioned Vance Spencer, Co-Founder at Framework Labs.
With its funding, Framework Labs introduced two strategic hires to guide the Labs initiative: Ray Pulver, former Co-Founder and CTO of IDEX, the world’s first real-time decentralized exchange; and Roy Learner, former Principal at Wavemaker Companions, a VC fund with $265 million in belongings beneath administration.
Co-founder Michael Anderson added, “We’re exceptionally proud to unveil Framework Labs, the manifestation of Framework Ventures’ Network Capital thesis: that alpha will be generated as much by hard work during network maturation as it is by picking winners early. To that end, the Framework Labs fintech studio will shape the way rising DeFi protocols function, bootstrapping liquidity for new projects, building retail-friendly tools, and staking to earn steady cash flows that stack atop themselves.”
